Are Public Sector Workers Different? Cross-European Evidence from Elderly Workers and Retirees

Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos

No 8238, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The public sector employs a large share of the labor force to execute important functions (e.g. regulation and public good provision) in an environment beset by severe agency problems. Attracting workers who are motivated to serve the public interest is important to mitigate these problems. We investigate whether public and private sector employees differ in terms of their public service motivation, as measured by their propensity to volunteer, using a representative sample of elderly workers from 12 European countries. To overcome potential identification difficulties related to unobservable differences in working conditions (e.g. working time, required effort, job security, career incentives), we also look at retired workers. We find that public sector workers, both those currently employed and those already retired, are significantly more prosocial; however, the difference in prosociality is explained by differences in the composition of the workforce across the two sectors, in terms of (former) workers' education and occupation. Looking across industries and within occupations, we find that former public sector workers in education are more motivated, while there are no differences across the two sectors when considering broad occupational categories. We also investigate other dimensions and find no differences in terms of trust, while there is evidence of some differences in risk aversion, political preferences, life and job satisfaction.

Keywords: life satisfaction; trust; risk aversion; public service motivation; public sector; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 H83 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-hap, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 4:11, 2015

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8238.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are public sector workers different? Cross-European evidence from elderly workers and retirees (2015)
Working Paper: Are Public Sector Workers Different? Cross-European Evidence from Elderly Workers and Retirees (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8238

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().